| contents |
| inside |
international |
| europa |
| spezial |
| cultur |
 |
ACTIVATING FUNCTIONS
The product of the Czech educational system — a passive data receiver?
| Helena Nutilova (REYKJAVÍK). In last six months I have had the honour to taste the flavour of the Icelandic educational system through the European education programme Erasmus, and I suppose that I would probably gain the same experience in every other European Western country. Through this experience I had the opportunity to compare the Czech educational system and the “Western” one and to think about the catastrophic effects of fourty years of communism in the Czech Republic.
I have only been studying at Czech schools so far. My participation in the Czech educational system amounts to seventeen years spent at a primary school, a secondary school and finally at the university. If I should describe a Czech student on the basis of this experience, I would call him a “passive data receiver”. I was always (especially at the university) required to just receive information mindlessly. And that is a roadblock. My Icelandic experience was like a clash with a new reality. For the first time in my life, I was asked to think independently. To consider things critically. To ask questions on my own. To express my own opinions. Unprecedented!
my Icelandic experience was
like a clash with a new reality
And what does my brain brought up by the Czech educational system say to that? It tries to resist even despite its relative “youth”. It is a sort of programme, which has encoded patterns of thinking that were input by people who spent most of their lives in the communistic reality. Although I was just six years old when “The Velvet Revolution” broke out I am still keeping in my mind the remains of the communistic regime. It was the regime in which free expression of own opinion divergent from the “ruling one” meant failure.
And what is the effect of all these things of my studies at the University of Iceland? Even though my brain strives to change its old manners of thinking which means to activate its functions through independent contemplation about certain problems, still some deep-rooted voice in it says: “Don’t present your opinion — it might seem to be wrong to the teacher and you will fail.” (We can replace the word “teacher” by any other authority.) And the other voice in my brain replies to the former one: “We have the pluralistic democracy! Every opinion is relevant and none is wrong!”
All this makes me think about how deeply the communistic ideology, or more precisely its realisation in practice, influenced not only the lives of the people living in its “fingers” but even the thinking of the following generations including me. I ask myself at the same time if a civil society can function in a state where people’s brains are used to think so passively as mine so far. I hope for a better future necessarily connected with a radical change of the concept of the Czech educational system. I hope for a change that will fit better to necessary requirements for realisation of the pluralistic democracy in conjunction with the functioning civil society in the Czech Republic.
| read also: Nothing to Do in Reykjavik?